YouTube Releases its First Video Explaining How it Handles Policy Violations

YouTube’s first quarterly Community Guidelines Enforcement Report sheds the light on the company’s policy about how it deals with policy violations and flagged videos. The Reporting Dashboard it launched freshly also allows the users to see their videos that have been flagged for their review.

The report, which is kind of inaugural and covers the last quarter of 2017, is subsequent to the assurance given by YouTube in last December that it will give the users more transparency about how the company handles abuse and how it decides whether a video should be removed or not.

In its official blog, YouTube stated that this new move will allow it to make things clear about removing content that is violative from its platform and added that this is going to be a regular update henceforth. It further added that it will refine the reporting system by the end of the year and will also add additional data together with the data on comments and cite reasons and policies for removal.

The report is likely to have any effect on the users who complain about YouTube’s rules being haphazardly implemented to please the advertisers whose commercials are played before playing videos with any violent content. A report by The Times UK focused on the same issue while many creators of the videos and content complain that it is becoming difficult to monetize through YouTube videos due to its updated policies.

However, YouTube claims that the anti-abuse machine learning algorithm is working better in dealing with videos with violent extremism and also with high-risk areas like spam. The algorithm allows YouTube to monitor and also handle any violations on a large scale.

YouTube also said that it has removed just over 8 million videos from its data in the last quarter of 2017 that were said to contain adult content or related to spam. Further, it added that out of the 8 million flagged videos, the algorithm was able to automatically flag 6.7 million videos. In addition, YouTube’s Trusted Flagger Program which is backed by NGOs, government agencies and individuals who are trained on its policy terms, was able to flag an additional 1.1 million videos. YouTube also included a detailed report about how the algorithm actually works.